In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States

by Jill Ker Conway

Jill Ker Conway, author of one of the most celebrated memoirs of recent decades, is also the premier anthologist of women's autobiographical writing.  In Her Own Words  is Conway's distillation of women's experience from the British Commonwealth world she came from, compared with major themes in women's lives in the United States, which is now her home.

In this dazzling collection, we meet twelve remarkable women—from Shirley Chisholm, the West Indian-raised girl who became the first black woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress, to Janet Frame, the brilliant New Zealand writer who overcame involuntary treatment in a mental institution to write one of the archetypal analyses of the postcolonial experience. We learn how the world of politics and the private self intersect in the four offshoots of the old British world, and see how these women have made a difference—by their honesty, by the scale of their struggle for self-knowledge and autonomy, and by the power of their writing.

Includes writing

         Patricia Adam-Smith        Lillian Hellman
         Rosemary Brown             Dorothy Hewett
         Kim Chernin                    Robin Hyde
         Shirley Chisholm              Dorothy Livesay
         Lauris Edmond                Sally Morgan
         Janet Frame                    Gabrielle Roy

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

624 pages, Paperback

First published March 9, 1999

About the author

Jill Ker Conway was an Australian-American author. Well known for her autobiographies, in particular her first memoir, The Road from Coorain. She was also Smith College's first female president, from 1975 to 1985, and served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Mary]

I read the excerpts from Chisholm and Hellman with interest. I read some of the excerpt from Chernin, an unfamiliar person to me. I am less interested for now in the women from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada although I may return to this book or to their autobiographies themselves later.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took my time with this book and read one section/one author at a time. It is a wonderful collection of female writers from several countries.

[Maureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book held special interest to me having grown up in the Outback of Australia, and ironically, in the same area that Jill Kerr Conway spent part of her childhood. Our paths crossed back then and years later, many years later, I was watching C-Span and on the book review she was the guest author. Amazing. A great read. A woman whose life eventually led her to become President of Smith College in the Eastern United States.

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kept this at my bedside to read and reread. N First-person writings by women of all classes and races. Not political or polemic, but personal, about their lives. One of the great memoir/essay anthologies.

[Colleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of it was really interesting and kept my attention.